"Little Nemo in Slumberland" dated June 30, 1909:
Transcript of Tweets by @LittleNemo1905 (DECEMBER 12, 2020):
Wow… this strip is AWESOME! … I mean… ahem… fighting is bad, kids. - 1/18
This strip is a straight continuation (as many have been in this series) from the last strip and features the main event! - 2/18
Nemo and Flip don the comically large boxing gloves brought last strip by the Dancing Missionary (who doesn’t stay to watch) and get to it. - 3/18
Nemo's bravado continues in this strip, but this time, he backs it up with some actually action! The kid can fight! Like Flip, I didn't know he had it in him. - 4/18
Flip, on the other hand, seems to reveal himself to be a bit of a windbag (which, I'm pretty sure, we all thought he was anyway)… he's all bark, no bite and the effortless defeat Nemo hands him is evidence of that. - 5/18
Interestingly, Flip seems to hit everywhere BUT Nemo… the poor Professor takes a couple wallops from Flip as he's winding up to try and sock Nemo, but (more interestingly) it's the pictorial content itself that is damaged. - 6/18
This creates a really interesting meta reading. Nemo seems to acknowledge that the "landscape" is made of a material that can tear… it isn't a shock to him. - 7/18
We've seen him acknowledge the fact that he and his friends are Sunday supplement characters, and although he doesn't directly here, the implication is the same. - 8/18
I wonder though how this impacts our understanding of the last few strips that feature the spatial retrograde and anterograde of the background scenery? - 9/18
Obviously, everything in these strips is, in reality, two-dimensional; it is artwork on newsprint. But, as a reader enters into Slumberland, a reader begins to see and feel the space as a 3D, inhabitable world. - 10/18
When Flip punches through the "landscape" (almost acting in this moment like a large theatre drop-in) it draws attention to the fact that the world is, of course, 2D… taking the reader out of the dreamscape and back into our chairs as readers. - 11/18
I find this particularly compelling since McCay has been toying with perspective, distance, and scale for the last few strips. Here, Flip's tearing the landscape seems almost to act as an indictment to those of us… - 12/18
…ok, me… who has spent a lot of time considering the formal implications of this experimentation. I can almost hear McCay: "Ha! I fooled ya, didn't I kids?" - 13/18
I'm quite fond of the enemata used in this strip, too! The concussion stars… impact stars… dizzy stars… whatever we want to call them, easily become a central visual focus to not only denote impact, but also create visual chaos to reflect the fight. - 14/18
It would seem as if McCay is using both the size of the star and the number of them to indicate the strength of any given hit. In this way, Nemo's final WHACK in panel 10 creates the largest and most stars upon impact with Flip's face. - 15/18
Nemo reveals that all he was after was Flip's cigar, but that turns out to be quite untrue… as he makes Flip swear that he will behave better in the coming strips after the licking he gave him… - 16/18
And, Flip agrees! It'll be interesting to see the repercussions of this strip. Does Flip live up to his promise? Can he possibly be a better behaved member of the Slumberland crew? - 17/18
This is my reading of "Little Nemo in Slumberland" #193. What's yours? - 18/18